The Hunt for Red October (Jack Ryan, #3)

by Tom Clancy

There was a cold north wind blowing, the only sort of north wind in this part of the world. Late autumn had been surprisingly mild, and scarcely any snow had fallen in an area that measures it in meters; then a week before a major winter storm had savaged the Murmansk coast, breaking pieces off the Arctic icepack.

Putin was the ship’s zampolit (political officer). Everything he did was to serve the Rodina (Motherland), a word that had mystical connotations to a Russian and, along with V. I. Lenin, was the Communist Party’s substitute for a godhead.

Ah, to be in Gorkiy on a day like this!” The bastard ought to work for Intourist, Ramius told himself, except that Gorkiy is a city closed to foreigners. He had been there twice. It had struck him as a typical Soviet city, full of ramshackle buildings, dirty streets, and ill-clad citizens. As it was in most Russian cities, winter was Gorkiy’s best season. The snow hid all the dirt.

Marko’s father had been a true Soviet hero—and Marko was deeply ashamed to be his son.

“A true Marxist is objective, Comrade Political Officer,” Ramius chided, savoring this last argument with Putin. “Objectively, that which aids us in carrying out our mission is good, that which hinders us is bad. Adversity is supposed to hone one’s spirit and skill, not dull them. Just being aboard a submarine is hardship enough, is it not?”

The Red October carried twenty-six SS-N-20 Seahawk missiles, each with eight 500-kiloton multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles—MIRVs—enough to destroy two hundred cities. Land-based bombers could only fly a few hours at a time, then had to return to their bases. Land-based missiles arrayed along the main East-West Soviet rail network were always where paramilitary troops of the KGB could get at them lest some missile regiment commander suddenly came to realize the power at his fingertips. But missile submarines were by definition beyond any control from land. Their entire mission was to disappear.

It was the custom in the Soviet Navy for the commanding officer to announce his ship’s operational orders and to exhort the crew to carry them out in true Soviet fashion. The orders were then posted for all to see—and be inspired by—outside the ship’s Lenin Room. In large surface ships this was a classroom where political awareness classes were held. In Red October it was a closet-sized library near the wardroom where Party books and other ideological material were kept for the men to read.

for Russians the island of Cuba was as exotic as Tahiti, a promised land of white sand beaches and dusky girls. Ramius knew differently. He had read articles in Red Star and other state journals about the joys of duty in Cuba. He had also been there.

In the Soviet Union every worker is a government worker, and they have a saying: As long as the bosses pretend to pay us, we will pretend to work.

The sorter tossed the envelope with a negligent flick of the wrist towards the surface mailbag for Moscow on the far side of his work table. It missed, dropping to the concrete floor. The letter would be placed aboard the train a day late. The sorter didn’t care. There was a hockey game that night, the biggest game of the young season, Central Army against Wings. He had a liter of vodka bet on Wings.

Petrov laughed at that. “Ah, and also you would have me learn a few things, Comrade Captain? They told me about you at Severomorsk. Fine, it will be as you say. But this will be the first political meeting I have missed in years.” “From what your file says, you could teach Party doctrine to the Politburo, Yevgeni Konstantinovich.” Which said little about his medical ability, Ramius thought.

Sunday was the normal day for the political awareness session at sea. Ordinarily Putin would have officiated, reading some Pravda editorials, followed by selected quotations from the works of Lenin and a discussion of the lessons to be learned from the readings. It is very much like a church service.

as he grew older Marko learned that Marxism-Leninism was a jealous god, tolerating no competing loyalties.

The Good of the People was a laudable enough goal, but in denying a man’s soul, an enduring part of his being, Marxism stripped away the foundation of human dignity and individual value. It also cast aside the objective measure of justice and ethics which, he decided, was the principal legacy of religion to civilized life.

Sasha had learned his lesson in the gulag: He did his duty efficiently and well, asking for nothing in return. After the war he’d been given a kind of freedom for his services, the right to perform backbreaking work under perpetual suspicion.

preparation, knowledge, and discipline can deal with any form of danger; that danger confronted properly is not something a man must fear.

Ramius gradually learned to play the game by American rules, training his officers and men with care. His crews were rarely as prepared as he wished—still the Soviet Navy’s greatest problem—but where other commanders cursed their men for their failings, Marko corrected the failings of his men.

Supposed to be here half an hour ago. Must be the snow.” The admiral jerked a hand towards the window. There were two inches on the ground, with another inch expected by nightfall. “One flake hits this town and everything goes to hell.”

He knew how to make a decision and was not afraid to say what he thought, whether his bosses liked it or not. This sometimes grated the old admiral, but on the whole he liked having subordinates whom he could respect. The CIA had too many people whose only skill was kissing ass.

The driver pulled smoothly into a vacant VIP slot and jumped out to open the doors after the security man had swept the area with his eyes. The judge got out first and went ahead, and as Ryan caught up he found himself walking on the man’s left, half a step behind. It took a moment to remember that this instinctive action was exactly what the marine corps had taught him at Quantico was the proper way for a junior officer to accompany his betters. It forced Ryan to consider just how junior he was.

The president took all this in, then turned to Ryan. “Dr. Ryan, you have managed to persuade me that your scenario is a theoretical possibility. Now, what does the CIA think we ought to do about it?” “Mr. President, I’m an intelligence analyst, not—” “I know very well what you are, Dr. Ryan. I’ve read enough of your work. I can see you have an opinion. I want to hear it.”

“This is a big move up in the world for you, if you do your job right. Hell, you might even like it.” Ryan was sure he wouldn’t, and he was right.

They were landing, the most dangerous part of carrier flight operations. He remembered a study conducted during the Vietnam War in which carrier pilots had been fitted with portable electrocardiographs to monitor stress, and it had surprised a lot of people that the most stressful time for carrier pilots wasn’t while they were being shot at—it was while they were landing, particularly at night.

The inside of the Kennedy was much like the interior of the USS Guam, the helicopter assault ship Ryan had been assigned to during his brief military career. It was the usual navy maze of steel bulkheads and pipes, everything painted the same shade of cave-gray. The pipes had some colored bands and stenciled acronyms which probably meant something to the men who ran the ship. To Ryan they might as well have been neolithic cave paintings.

The Dallas’ chart table was a new gadget wired into the BC-10 and projected onto a TV-type glass screen four feet square. The display moved as the Dallas moved. This made paper charts obsolete, though they were kept anyway. Charts can’t break.

The altimeter showed twenty-six thousand feet when Ryan was blasted by pure sunlight. One thing about flying that he never got used to was that no matter how awful the weather was on the ground, if you flew high enough you could always find the sun. The light was intense, but the sky’s color was noticeably deeper than the soft blue seen from the ground.

The sublieutenant stood by as Ryan unzipped and took off his helmet, Mae West, and coverall.

“Mae West” is apparently a life vest

The attention of the eight flag officers turned to the map table. Fifty-eight Soviet submarines and twenty-eight surface warships, plus a gaggle of oilers and replenishment ships, were unmistakably heading for the American coast. To face this, the U.S. Navy had one available carrier. The Invincible did not rate as such. The threat was considerable. Among them the Soviet vessels carried over three hundred surface-to-surface cruise missiles. Though principally designed as antiship weapons, the third of them believed to carry nuclear warheads were sufficient to devastate the cities of the East Coast. From a position off New Jersey, these missiles could range from Norfolk to Boston.

That’s the one thing about the Russians—they remind me so much of the mafia chieftains I used to prosecute. The same smattering of culture and good manners, and the same absence of morality.”

The most wounding insult to an educated Russian was to be called nekulturny, uncultured—the term didn’t translate adequately—yet the same men who sat in the gilt boxes at the Moscow State Opera weeping at the end of a performance of Boris Gudunov could immediately turn around and order the execution or imprisonment of a hundred men without blinking. A strange people, made more strange by their political philosophy.

There was a considerable amount of surface noise. The signal processors filtered most of it out, and every few minutes Jones switched them off his channel, getting the sound unimpeded to make sure that they weren’t filtering too much out. Machines were dumb; Jones wondered if SAPS might be letting some of that anomalous signal get lost inside the computer chips. That was a problem with computers, really a problem with programming: you’d tell the machine to do something, and it would go do it to the wrong thing.

You men, of course, will be our guests. A lot of our people will want to talk with you. For the moment, you can be sure that you will be treated very well—better than you can imagine.” Ryan was sure that the CIA would give each a considerable sum of money. He didn’t say so, not wanting to insult this kind of bravery. It had surprised him to learn that defectors rarely expect to receive money, almost never ask for any.

Ryan saw that words were painted on the tubes, with other inscriptions forged onto the metal itself. The letters were in Cyrillic and probably said No Smoking or Lenin Lives or something similarly useless. He saw and heard everything with great acuity, as though someone had taken sandpaper to all his senses to make him fantastically alert.

Didn’t the police try to reason with barricaded suspects? Didn’t a New York cop say on TV once, “We try to bore them to death”? But those were criminals. What was Ryan dealing with? A sailor who stayed behind? One of Ramius’ own officers who’d had second thoughts? A KGB agent? A GRU agent covered as a crewman?

Trained field officer or not, he was a kid, a frightened kid, and probably had as much to lose as Ryan had. Like hell, Ryan thought, I have a wife and two kids, and if I don’t get to him fast, I’ll sure as hell lose them. Merry Christmas, kids, your daddy just got blown up. Sorry there’s no body to bury, but you see . . . It occurred to Ryan to pray briefly—but for what? For help in killing another man? It’s like this, Lord

At Quantico he was taught to read maps, evaluate terrain, call in air and artillery strikes, maneuver his squads and fire teams with skill—and here he was, stuck in a goddamned steel pipe three hundred feet underwater, shooting it out with pistols in a room with two hundred hydrogen bombs!

Ryan was watching something he had never seen before, men from two different places and two very different cultures trying to find common ground. Both sides were reaching out, seeking similarities of character and experience, building a foundation for understanding. This was more than interesting. It was touching. Ryan wondered how difficult it was for the Soviets. Probably harder than anything he had ever done—their bridges were burned. They had cast themselves away from everything they had known, trusting that what they found would be better. Ryan hoped they would succeed and make their transition from Communism to freedom. In the past two days he had come to realize what courage it took for men to defect. Facing a gun in a missile room was a small matter compared with walking away from one’s whole life. It was strange how easily Americans put on their freedoms.

“You have them for more than three years, then?” Ramius asked. “Oh, yeah. Hell, otherwise we’d be letting them go right after they’re fully trained, right?” Why couldn’t the Soviet Navy get and retain people like this? Ramius thought. He knew the answer all too well. The Americans fed their men decently, gave them a proper mess room, paid them decently, gave them trust—all the things he had fought twenty years for.

The officer with him, Bugayev, was a friendly enough guy. At first he’d been a little standoffish—as if he were a lord and I were a serf, Jones thought—until he’d seen how the skipper treated him. This surprised Jones. From what little he knew of Communism he had expected everyone to be fairly equal. Well, he decided, that’s what I get from reading Das Kapital in a freshman poli-sci course. It made a lot more sense to look at what Communism built. Garbage, mostly. The enlisted men didn’t even have their own mess room. Wasn’t that some crap! Eating your meals in your bunk rooms!

“And I wish to work on a real computer,” Bugayev went on, wishful. Jones laughed quietly. “So, buy yourself one.” “Buy a computer?” “Sure, we got a couple of little ones, Apples, on Dallas. Cost you about, oh, two thousand for a nice system. That’s a lot less than what a car goes for.” “A computer for two thousand dollars?” Bugayev went from wishful to suspicious, certain that Jones was leading him on. “Or less. For three grand you can get a really nice rig. Hell, you tell Apple who you are, and they’ll probably give it to you for free, or the navy will. If you don’t want an Apple, there’s the Commodore, TRS-80, Atari. All kinds. Depends on what you want to use it for. Look, just one company, Apple, has sold over a million of ’em. They’re little, sure, but they’re real computers.”

Chambers’ face screwed into a grimace. You’re an officer, he told himself, they pay you to think. First, what’s happening? Second, what do you do about it? Think it through, then act.

“I hope we don’t run into any civilian traffic,” Mancuso said. “But you said the harbor entrance was closed,” Ramius said. “Might be some guy in a little sailboat out there. The public has free passage through the yard to the Dismal Swamp Canal, and they’re damned near invisible on radar. They slip through all the time.” “This is crazy.” “It’s a free country, Captain,” Ryan said softly. “It will take you some time to understand what free really means. The word is often misused, but in time you will see just how wise your decision was.”